The insult that seems to have finally driven Sheehan back to her California home was delivered by a Democratic Party she helped bring into power in November. Dubbed by the anti-war movement as the “Memorial Day Betrayal,” the new Congress gave President Bush funding for the war in Iraq last Thursday with no timeline for troop withdrawal.

“There is absolutely no sane or defensible reason for you to hand Bloody King George more money to condemn more of our brave, tired, and damaged soldiers and the people of Iraq to more death and carnage,” she wrote in her previous Daily Kos diary, which she posted Saturday morning.

Sheehan also slapped the anti-war movement on her way out, writing, “I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.”

Gosh, really? Just like the peaceniks have been doing since 1967 and earlier. In the end, it's all about power, and it's all about Marxist factions beating each other up for dominance, just like the Leninists and Trotskyites of old. Apparently, we not only need Marxism. But we need the kind of Marxism preached by [fill in the blank]. Cindy is/was double-plus obnoxious, but surely no more so than the rest of her fractious, U.S.-hating cohort. But now she's decided to have a hissy-fit and go home. With the narcissistic left, there's no negotiation. It's their way or the highway. And Cindy's way, not atypical in this world of arrested adolescence, was not the way, apparently, of the more powerful Party Cohorts.

One fellow Marxist tried to give credit to Sheehan's contribution to the "anti-war effort" but unwittingly reveals a bit of lefty mythmaking in the process:

When Sheehan first began to actively oppose the war in Iraq, she linked up with the group Military Families Speak Out, said Nancy Lessin, a co-founder.

“There was an anti-war movement building in this country in the fall of 2002, but the media didn’t pay attention to it,” she said.

The left is brilliant when it comes to manufacturing history. There was no anti-war movement whatever "building in this country in the fall of 2002." It has been there 24/7 since the mid-1960s, continuously lying in wait for the U.S. to defend itself against a new enemy. Like Wall Street's "perma-bears," always ready to short stocks or talk the market down, the hardened anti-U.S. left, aka the anti-war left, is always hunkered down, locked and loaded, and ready to cause trouble and grab headlines from a compliant MSM, particularly during a Republican administration. The reason anti-war movements "build" so quickly is that it only takes a few phone calls (or now, emails), to fire up the base, tap funds from George Soros or North Korea, and go on the offensive. (And, the above observation to the contrary, the media is ALWAYS ready to pay attention to anti-war types who reliably bray the same tired slogans the moment the cameras are turned on. The media never has to work to get these "stories," which is the perfect match for the laziness of today's average journo.)

But back to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Cindy was convenient to these perma-revolutionaries. But now she has committed the Marxist mortal sin of denouncing the anointed: the Democrats, the faux political party that has served as the front group for the hard left since circa 1970. Very shortly, we'll see, in at least some leftist quarters, Mother Sheehan being denounced with nearly as much vehemence as Chimpy BushMcHitler. Note the process is already underway in the Politico article we're citing:

Moderate Democrats called Sheehan’s political acumen into question when she criticized Israel at least twice and visited Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in January 2006. For the right, she quickly became lumped with Michael Moore as a caricature of an anti-war activist.

Aside from the unintentionally hilarious oxymoron "moderate Democrats," this is the opening shot in the redefinition of Mother Sheehan. You read it first here in HazZzMat.

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Right over the Memorial Day holiday (of course), Cindy "Mother" Sheehan has called it quits, signaling an end to her protracted, infantile, Marxist, anti-U.S. temper tantrum. A poster-child for the recidivist Boomer left, Cindy wails that her asinine, anti-Bush crusade (for that's really what it was) has cost her her hubby and kids. Which is what tends to happen when a family member turns incorrigible and hateful, Clueless Cindy, or didn't you know?

This is my resignation letter as the "face" of the American anti-war movement. This is not my "Checkers" moment, because I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system. This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people who try to help it. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or anymore people that I love and the rest of my resources.

Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

"Resignation letter"? Resignation from what? Who appointed her in the first place? Is this enough smarminess to gag on or what?

Whether this little coda got some editorial help or not, it's the best evidence yet of the megalomania of the American left as personified by yet another deranged but self-righteous Boomer idiot. The "good old US of A" is only worthy if it measures up, 100%, to Cindy's Marxist "standards." The hell with you or me and our standards. It's only the "standards" of the left, specifically Cindy Sheehan's in this case, that matter, not ours. Guess we should hang our heads, huh? This is perhaps the best example yet of the infantilism that characterizes the American left. Screw the U.S. It's all about me, ME!!

Oh, well, there's a silver lining hidden in all this thunderation:

Camp Casey [the 5 acres adjacent to the Bush ranch that Cindy bought to stage anti-Bush demonstrations during the president's holidays] has served its purpose. It’s for sale. Anyone want to buy five beautiful acres in Crawford , Texas ? I will consider any reasonable offer. I hear George Bush will be moving out soon, too...which makes the property even more valuable.

Bush moving out? More than likely, he'll stay. A former president has to live somewhere. But who are we to dispute the transcendental wisdom of Mother Sheehan? She says so. Therefore, it must be the truth.

Hint to real estate investors: Lowball her. Better yet, wait her out and let the acreage go into foreclosure. It's what this imposter deserves for dumping chamber pots on our country and our military all in the name of her heroic son who would have been infuriated by these antics. As was the rest of Cindy's estranged family, with whom she will allegedly try to make amends—on her own terms, of course:

I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost. I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble.

Sure. Cindy Sheehan went out on a crusade to get face time on TV, deliver endless fusillades of Marxist, anti-U.S. propaganda, and disgrace her family in the process. And now she, herself, is claiming victimhood, the final refuge of a leftist scoundrel. It's our fault for her stupidity. No hugging, no learning.

I'm sure all the Sheehan family members are just willing to let bygones be bygones, even if the family name and honor have been dragged through the mud for the past two years. And of course, unquestionably, now that Cindy has declared that her plight is our fault, these family members should bail the unemployed Sheehan out of all the debt she racked up enjoying a good bit more than her ill-gotten 15 minutes of fame. (More here.)

The only people more disgraceful than Sheehan during all of this were the drive-by media who milked this extended tantrum for all the anti-Bush footage they could pack. She'll be lucky if anyone named Sheehan even opens the door when she knocks looking for a handout. (Maybe she should hit up her exploiters, Kos and his wealthy Marxist patron George Soros, who both left her high and dry after she'd worn out her usefulness.)

So now, exit Cindy Sheehan, stage left. Believe it or not, we actually don't take a lot of pleasure in this. We fear that there are more than enough lefty Boomer narcissists to step in now and take Cindy's place. The next one will pop up sooner rather than later. And the MSM will be ready anytime, anywhere, as long as the next lefty egomaniac can generate more anti -Bush, anti-military, anti U.S. propaganda in time for the evening news that no one ever watches anymore.

Friday, May 25, 2007

Well, how about that? HazZzMat finally has something nice to say about the French, who, apparently completely fed up with Jacques Chirac's kleptomaniac presidency and sneering, anti-US ways, rejected a socialist as well, electing right-leaning Nicolas Sarkozy as their new president. Taken in context with Germany's still-recent election of Angela Merkel as its new head of state, once again after throwing out the anti-US crowd, perhaps we are beginning to see a change in Europe's attitude toward the Islamofascists in their midst. And perhaps it won't be long before America's virulently anti-Bush hard left, which pays ritual obeisance to socialist intellectual elitists in Europe, finds that the new crop of Euro elitists has begun to out-Bush Bush himself.

Take immigration, illegal and otherwise, which Bush himself seems oddly cavalier about.

Sarko's crowd has a different approach, one sure to find favor with Americans who have no problem with immigration just as long as it respects our laws and customs. France's illegals, of course, come largely from its former colonial empire in North Africa. Which unfortunately means that this huge body of legal and illegal foreign nationals is increasingly of the Islamofascist persuasion and is given to trashing and burning cars when pissed while threatening non-scarved Frenchwomen with rape if they don't suit up in full body armor.

France is home to over 5 million immigrants -- and the new conservative-led government doesn't plan on making things any more comfortable for them. While the new regime in Paris is determined to curb illegal immigration, it is also looking to encourage legal migrants to reconsider their decision to stay in France -- by paying them to go back home.

New immigration minister, Brice Hortefeux, confirmed on Wednesday that the government is planning to offer incentives to more immigrants to return home voluntarily. "We must increase this measure to help voluntary return. I am very clearly committed to doing that," Hortefeux said in an interview with RFI radio.

What a concept. Now riddle me this: which courageous American legislator will be the first to counterpropose legislation like this instead of the fiscally and legally ruinous amnesty package currently being pushed toward a willing but out-of-touch White House? (Hint on the correct answer: Beats me.)

While the MSM has endlessly pushed the meme that the Democrats won in 2006 because Americans "are against the war," we have continued to vigorously disagree. We've always thought it was more due to disgust by the Republican and Reagan-Democrat base at the Republican Congress' spendthrift ways in the previous Congress. Among other things, we've figured that the Reagan-Dems in particular came to the conclusion that, if they wanted real spendthrifts in Congress, why not vote for authentic Democrats than for Republicans who professed to be fiscal conservatives while behaving like Socialists?

Wonk in particular has also blamed the defeat of former Virginia Republican Senator George Allen not on the dumb "macaca" remark endlessly flogged by the Washington Post in a (successful) effort to bring him down in favor of the born-again Democrat Jim Webb. We blamed it on Northern and Tidewater Virginia Republicans taking out their frustrations on Virginia's majority party which had just rung down the curtain on desperately-needed road improvements in both regions. Since Virginia has offyear state and local elections, the hapless Allen was the only Republican standing that voters could take their frustrations out on in 2006.

Republicans lose elections not "because of Bush's War" or some other excuse promoted by the media. They lose elections because they stop acting like Republicans and start acting like poor imitations of real, socialist Democrats, pretty much the only kind we have these days. Who needs faux socialists when, with the Dems, you can get the real deal, puffer-pigeon righteousness and all.

Pursuing this same point, Fred Thompson—after devastating Idiotarian propagandist Michael Moore recently in a brilliant online video riposte (answering the phony documentarian's challenge to "debate" him)—hit the nail right on the head yesterday in a speech in Atlanta where he kidded the crowd about his potential presidential ambitions before lobbing out this compelling observation:

"Someone once said that a cat won't sit on a hot stove twice, but he won't sit on a cold stove ever," Thompson said. "Here we had an election that was traumatic for some people, and the media blamed it on Iraq. I think it had more to do with pork barrel spending and corruption than it did Iraq."

Yep. So do we.

No doubt about it. This guy is the real deal. He has Ronald Reagan's ability to sell an idea backed up by a self-deprecating, folksy sense of humor. His increasing presence on the public stage strongly indicates that while the original "Law & Order" series may be returning again this fall, it may need to cast a new senior partner in Thompson's current role. Thompson may be off doing something else this fall.

The failure of the spring offensive will probably prove fatal to the aspirations of Mullah Omar to seize power. He has lost three of his four top lieutenants in the past five years since his expulsion, and he has not even come close to winning. Without Mullah Dadullah and field commanders like Mullah Najibullah, Omar has little skill left in the field and fewer Afghans fighting for his cause. The fact that his hopes now hinge on a force made up largely of foreign fighters and part-timers in Helmand shows that his movement has dissipated....The Taliban Stumbles; The Brain Drain At The Top, Ed Morrissey (captainsquarters.com), 5/25/2007

Compiled in Front Page Magazine's War Blog is this gem from Captain's Quarters' Ed Morrissey. As Robert Kaplan wisely noted in Imperial Grunts, his survey of Americans in action in the Global War on Terror, when NATO sticks to local organizing, commando tactics, and stays away from Big Army firebase strategy, the Taliban hasn't got a prayer.

Contrary to the popular refrain that Iraq is a “distraction” from the true fight against terrorism, al-Qaeda has in recent years suffered serious defeats. Consider that of the operatives that bin Laden hoped to involve in his plot to attack the United States, al-Libi was captured and is now out of commission in much-maligned Guantanamo Bay; al-Rabia was killed in 2005 in Pakistan; and al-Zarqawi met his unlamented end in a June 2006 strike by the U.S. military in Diyala province...Not that you will hear this from the war’s critics. To acknowledge success would require them to concede that Iraq is...the frontline in the global war on terror...an admission that, on the question of Iraq’s centrality to the war against al-Qaeda, President Bush is right...Iraqis are more forthright. Lt. Gen. Aboud Qanbar, the Iraqi commander overseeing the security plan, told the Washington Post...that while sectarian violence is the leading problem in the country, it cannot be understood apart from al-Qaeda‘s involvement...“Terrorists of al-Qaeda and the enemies of Iraq, they want to start a crisis. The objective behind this is to incite sectarian strife.”...,The Right Fight, Jacob Laksin, Front Page Magazine, 5/25/2007

The Democrats who ignore this, that is to say, most of those quoted regularly by MSM, not only don't read, hear, or see this stuff -- the finest type of surrender monkey, but are close to declaring that the only hope for the Left is an alliance with radical Islam. How so? Surrender to your enemy abroad is often a means to wage war on your enemies at home. When the Third Republic of France surrendered to Hitler in 1940, no small part of the French elite's motivations was the hope that the Nazis would rid France of her troublemakers, i.e., the political opposition. What's your motivation, Mr. Reid?

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Wonk's continued to be quite busy, work-wise, resulting in fewer posts. But I just thought you'd like to know that I am spending a couple days with Mrs. Wonker near Blacksburg, VA in a mountaintop hotel aptly named Mountain Lake. The lake, unfortunately, is a little low right now due to current drought conditions, but the old hotel is a beauty. And amazingly, it turns out this is where the fabled film "Dirty Dancing" was actually staged. The movie takes place in the "Poconos" of course, but darned if it wasn't filmed right here in this picturesque locale. Who knew? (Well, I didn't.)

Friday, May 18, 2007

Bill Clinton was never called to account for his brilliant political sleight of hand in California in the mid to late 1990s. The administration and its friends quietly supported local party hacks in pushing a program benevolently named "Citizenship USA." Pushed by Al Gore as part of his vaunted—and otherwise largely failed—"re-inventing government" effort, "Citizenship USA" was, in fact, a program of outright fraud promoted by the Clintonistas and implemented via the then INS. It worked spectacularly well for the Democrats in 1996, so they kept it going:

The politicization of the INS continued in the 2000 election. As documented by journalist Joseph Farah, on Nov. 6, 2000, (one day before the national election) the California Democratic Party sent thousands (upwards of 4 million by some estimates) of mailers out to immigrants who had citizenship requests before the INS. These non-citizens were informed, in both English and Spanish, that they were registered to vote as a Democrat and given a special identification card to "help...voting go more smoothly." Follow up investigations by the press pointed to the possible use of INS records to commit this massive voter fraud. How many of the recipients took advantage of the generous offer made by the Democrats is unknown, but based on the estimates it is quite possible that Gore's much touted popular vote win (by just under a million votes) could all be attributed to this scam alone. Flaws in the system continue to be used and expanded upon to give the Left an unfair advantage in elections and to undermine the legitimacy of our most fundamental American right.

Again, the object here is to rush through the system mass quantities of legal immigrants in such a way as to give them citizenship without the usual careful scrutiny while, via fraudulent communications, registering them automatically as Democrats. This spectacularly successful system rushed even hardened criminals through the system, into citizenship, and into the Democrat Party just in time to send California's 53 electoral votes, perhaps fraudulently, into the Gore column. Had the MSM not allowed this voter-mill scheme to operate beneath the radar, the "disputed" election of 2000 might not have occurred.

The investigation into INS shenanigans began with a May 1996 report in the Washington Times about an INS whistleblower who criticized the acceleration of the naturalization process under Clinton-Gore. It quoted other INS employees who revealed the existence of a program known as Citizenship USA, and questioned the motives behind it.

Citizenship USA was an initiative of Vice President Al Gore that was ostensibly part of his National Performance Review to "reinvent" government. Internal White House memos, obtained by the House Judiciary Committee in 1997, showed that the vice president was well aware that the effort could be perceived as a "pro-Democrat voter mill."

On March 28, 1996, White House aide Doug Farbrother e-mailed Gore detailing his efforts to get INS to waive fingerprinting and background checks "to make me confident they could produce a million new citizens before Election Day."

Gore then wrote Clinton: "You asked us to expedite the naturalization of nearly a million legal aliens who have applied to become citizens." The risk, Gore warned, was that "we might be publicly criticized for running a pro-Democrat voter mill and even risk having Congress stop us."

Congress did complain -- but only after the election.

But wait: there's more!

In response to those complaints, the Joint Management Division of the Department of Justice hired KPMG Peat Marwick to review the Citizenship USA program, which ran from Aug. 31, 1995 through Sept. 30, 1996. They found that of the 1,049,867 aliens naturalized under the program, INS never did fingerprint checks on 180,000 persons.

"Applicants who were ineligible because of criminal records, or because they fraudulently obtained green cards, were granted citizenship because the INS was moving too fast to check their records," says Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who chaired the House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on the IG report last September.

In addition to those 180,000, Smith said, "more than 80,000 aliens had fingerprint checks that generated criminal records, but they were naturalized anyway."

Since they have been losing elections legally, Democrats, particularly in the Southwest today continue to use all manner of fraud to register as many legal and illegal Hispanics as possible to vote in the next election, thus putting more Dems back into power by whatever means are required.

America had been tilting reliably Republican since the late 1970s, disgusted with the Democrats' leftward turn, and there seemed no way to stop the creation of a permanent Republican majority. So the Dems did what the Dems do best. They rigged the system. The once reliably Republican West and Southwest are now being swamped by tens of thousands of illegally registered immigrant voters who almost certainly should not be on the voter rolls. Since merely pointing out this fact will get one condemned instantly as a "racist," however, very few are willing to step forward and put an end to this massive fraud. And so it continues. California is lost and New Mexico is pretty much down the tubes. Colorado is slipping, and Nevada, Arizona, and even Texas are the next targets. (Dems have been thwarted in Florida thus far by the only Hispanic voters who are reliably Republican: the Casto-loathing Cuban-Americans.)

Which brings us to the current immigration bill now poised for votes before the House and the Senate after a late-night compromise. You know the old joke: if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck... Or in this case, if it looks like an amnesty bill and squawks like an amnesty bill...well, that's what it is, right?

No one supporting the bill, including a bevy of deluded Republicans, wants to call this bill what it is, but we are. It's an amnesty bill plain and simple.

We know why the Dems support it. It means that they can continue to fraudulently allow even more millions of non-citizens into the voting booth to further overwhelm existing Republican majorities in more and more red states. Oh, the bill doesn't condone that, but it does most assuredly allow the Dems to continue operating under the radar doing what they've been doing successfully for roughly 10 years: thwarting the will of the majority by making it a minority in the greatest ballot-stuffing maneuver of all time.

Although the Bushies have been damned for their support of this and similar measures, their support of the current amnesty act is practical if more than a bit naive. The Bush Republicans seem to think that if they are seen supporting this or similar measures, the waves of newly amnestied Hispanic voters will somehow instantly change their allegiance to the Republicans and allow THEM to stuff the ballot box. The deficient reasoning here is astounding. In the first place, the Democrats are the true professionals when it comes to stuffing the ballot box. Republicans can't even compete.

But more importantly, the Democrats are successful at this vote stealing methodology precisely because, inspired by Clinton's sheer political genius, they chose precisely the correct agents to put this voter fraud into motion: Hispanics who illegally emigrate to the U.S. from south of the border. Virtually without exception, citizens from all countries to our South regularly and customarily elect and re-elect the same corrupt, failed socialist parties to whom they are forced to pay allegiance. It's normal and customary. The Democrats are clearly recognized as America's socialist party. So when thousands of newly legal or illegal Hispanic voters are rushed through the rolls by Democrat hacks, they know who to thank. They've already been conditioned to know who's boss.

In short, the Republicans don't have a chance at this game because they're not good at it. Further, they're perceived, rightly or wrongly, as the party of the wealthy, oppressive elites by these new voters, who are already conditioned to believe Democrat propaganda. Since again, that's how they've been socially conditioned in their own countries of origin.

The Bushies have pushed amnesty because they think it will allow them to win their fair share of these new voters. They are, however, sadly mistaken. This is sheer fantasy. The game is rigged. And supporting the rigged game is only going to result in the Republican's next 50-year banishment from majority status. As I've written publicly, however, as much as we support the Repubs here at HazZzMat, they not infrequently revert to form as the "stupid party" and commit political hari-kari (or however it's fashionable to spell it these days), just as they did by outspending the Democrats prior to the last elections and pissing off their own base in the process.

So now here we are, trying to save the Repubs from their own stupidity—again. Like most conservative blogs, we've noted that there are very possibly enough conservatives AND socialist votes in Congress to smash this compromise and probably finish it off until after the next elections. Real conservatives know precisely what's going on here and wouldn't have needed to read this dissertation. Real socialists, on the other hand, have already noted that there are SOME safeguards against fraud in this measure. So they want nothing to do with it as it might limit their success in building a permanent, if phony, majority for the rest of this century. Combined, these dissidents may just be able to bottle this collective measure up in the House and Senate, allowing it to die a quiet and well-deserved death.

So, if you've managed to get through this, your task is clear. Get on the phone or on the net NOW, contact your congressman's or senator's office, and tell your rep you want this constitution-mocking amnesty bill stopped. There's not much time. If you're a Repub, and if it does pass, well, in 10 years, the U.S. will be so far down the path to irreversible socialism that it will make the Russians look like Conservatives.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

One of the nice things about being a Democrat, whether on the Hill or the kind that infest our State Department, is that you can press ahead, unhindered, in thwarting Republican foreign policy until you can smear the Republicans efficiently enough to get the Democrats back in power. At which point, you can move ahead once again unhindered in ruining America like your fellow socialists ruined Europe. That includes keeping a Republican president's most potentially effective appointees from being appointees. And the press will never call you on your refusal to allow the "illegitimate" Republicans to govern; because the MSM agrees that all Republicans are illegitimate and thus not fit to represent the United States, particularly before their rich Socialist betters in Europe and the enlightened Third World.

That's one of the reasons the Dems opposed, and eventually thwarted the Bushies from keeping John Bolton as this country's best-ever representative to the corrupt and hypocritical U.N. If you doubt us, link here to Little Green Footballs which provides some audio proof of Bolton's crisp effectiveness. Bolton is being interviewed by the usual smarmy, condescending BBC reporter who tries again and again to score cheap shots against Bolton, Bush, and the U.S. Alas, it is not the BBC's day. Bolton refuses the bait, and, more importantly, refuses to accept the erroneous premises of the slanted line of questioning. Take a listen. You can learn a lot that will serve you in good stead the next time you get ambushed by a leftie propagandist.

(PS, We'd have brought the link here, but we can't seem to get the track copied over. So head on over to LGF and enjoy.)

Friday, May 11, 2007

Wonk's been gone while, partially due to travel and partially due to an ongoing, botched installation of a new Verizon DSL line. Erm, botched on a self-install by yours truly, not Verizon. But we'll figure it out, and Luther has been ably holding down the fort.

Meanwhile, to celebrate the election of France's new, pro-American (albeit somewhat "green") President Sarkozy, here's a nifty grafik we found on PowerLine. Seems not only freeloading French leftists are rioting at this affront to their intellectual superiority and their earnest desire to become dhimmis. The "patriots" at the New York Times are also making their displeasure felt:

How could such a thing have happened in France? Probably more of Carl Rove's evildoing.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Balkan Muslim cultures in particular are among those most saturated with Sufism, and are singled out in the Rand report as a potential base for partnership with the democratic powers in the strengthening of moderate Islam...Yet even in the Balkans, all is not peace and poetry. The ominous presence of Wahhabi missionaries, financiers, terror recruiters, and other mischief-makers bespeaks a fresh offensive in that tormented land. From the new Wahhabi seminary in the lovely Bosnian city of Zenica, to the cobblestone streets of Sarajevo's old Ottoman center, to the Muslim-majority villages in southern Serbia, extremist Sunni men in their distinctive, untrimmed beards and short, Arab style breeches (worn in imaginary emulation of Muhammad), accompanied by women in face veils and full body coverings (a bizarre novelty in the contemporary Balkans), are again appearing, funded by reactionary Saudis and Pakistanis. They aim to widen the horizon of global jihad--witness the revived campaign of terrorism in Morocco and Algeria. In the Balkans, their targets are both Sufis and traditional Muslims....The Balkans, The Wahhabis Are Up To No Good In southern Europe, Stephen Schwartz, The Weekly Standard, 5/8/2007

For those uninterested in the tragic incarceration of Paris Hilton, there is no such notion as "the armies of the night", the unknown and ghastly surprise of vast conflicts. Many of them (one supposes this includes few elected Democrats) are aware of what Stephen Schwartz is talking about, that the intrusion into Europe by radical Islam has not ceased. The war goes on and it's getting closer. One supposes that a reason we ignore this kind of story is that we're unwilling to face what it means. Part of what it means is that as long as we subsidize the Wahhabis by buying their oil, we can't expect them to stop buying weapons to explode on our friends and on us.

A little history -- funny thing about the Russian Bolsheviks, they never had much money to buy from us. We couldn't, as Lenin put it, sell our enemy the rope that he could use to hang us. But radical Islam, whose biggest sponsors are Saudi Arabia and Iran, has been buying that rope for decades. We provide them the money, as we do Iran, by buying their oil and by not transforming our energy usage toward domestically produced energy sources in a range from oil to deep gas to nuclear. There are environmental constituencies, wishing to keep that perfect preserve of their imaginations, that have blocked the entire process. For all that has been said about Congress being a whore of the energy companies, fact is that Congress, especially a Democrat majority Congress, has been any environmentalist's tart before acting positively on an issue of wartime national survival.

But Congress, in its perverse ways, does respond to majority concerns. And, sad to say, majority concerns are almost anywhere but on the transformation of our energy economy. Congress is entitled to act on the beliefs of a majority of its membership. This is in the constitution. It is not, alas, much represented in modern politics, which bears more than a passing resemblance to mob rule. In this respect, as in obvious ones, such as the various surrender measures currently being passed around on Capitol Hill, Congress is really the whore of our enemy. The question becomes, to stick to the metaphor, a simple one: how long will we keep buying this monster's tricks? Our country is at stake; it doesn't matter which party represents our country's interests. What matters is that they get represented. Currently, as regards the energy economy, it is fair to say they are not. As long as radical Islam is on the march toward Europe and toward us, the issue of who's paying for their advance (us) is a national, political issue. Congress doesn't think so. This is what you usually get from a whore, the illusion of pleasure followed by the consequences of the act.

Friday, May 04, 2007

But China’s success is, at least in part, a mirage. True, 200 million of her subjects, fortunate to be working for an expanding global market, increasingly enjoy a middle-class standard of living. The remaining 1 billion, however, remain among the poorest and most exploited people in the world, lacking even minimal rights and public services. Popular discontent simmers, especially in the countryside, where it often flares into violent confrontation with Communist Party authorities. China’s economic “miracle” is rotting from within...The Party’s primary concern is not improving the lives of the downtrodden; it seeks power more than it seeks social development....Empire of Lies, Guy Sorman, City Journal, Spring 2007

This Guy Sorman corrective, an essay in the latest City Journal, is worth studying as it challenges most of MSM's (not to mention the State Department's) presumptions about both the opportunities and the threat of Chinese "hegemony". It's important to look behind the veil of any headline or 30 second opinion piece. You might be surprised.

Thursday, May 03, 2007

Well, what did Matt expect from this dying, once conservative, but now reliably leftist newsrag. TIME lives in the lefty world where "celebrities," who make a lot of money and even more vapid pronouncements based upon ignorance, are regarded as America's oracles. A Republican president, re-elected by a decisive majority of both the electoral and the popular vote in 2004, is not. This is a prime example of how the lefty MSM creates a phony reality that differs from the world that you and I inhabit.

We are fortunate that the blogosphere and talk radio exist. Otherwise, we'd have already been re-defined into a socialist paradise where we live as peons to the state, which will apparently be run by wealthy entertainers with dachas in LA.

Wonk is on the road thru the weekend, but will return to blogging early next week. Work has kept postings a little thin on HazZzMat's DC end, but we'll get re-involved as soon as we can.